16 October 2009

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (241)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the ABA Journal (from Tuesday, October 13; link good at time of posting):

A Georgia federal judge has fined California lawyer Orly Taitz $20,000 for her litigation tactics in a suit questioning whether Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen.

U.S. District Judge Clay Land said he had no reservations about sanctioning Taitz, the Cincinnati Ledger-Enquirer reports. “A clearer case could not exist; a weaker message would not suffice.”

....

“The absolute absence of any legitimate legal argument, combined with the political diatribe in her motions, demonstrates that Ms. Taitz’s purpose is to advance a political agenda and not to pursue a legitimate legal cause of action,” Land said. “Rather than citing to binding legal precedent, she calls the president names, accuses the undersigned of treason, and gratuitously slanders the president’s father....

“Counsel’s wild accusations may be protected by the First Amendment when she makes them on her blog or in her press conferences, but the federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes, not as a platform for political rhetoric and personal insults.”

2 comments:

Okay, in the midst of grading student papers, you've forced me to look up the meaning of Schadenfreude. {Which goes to prove, yet again, that no matter how many degrees you have, law included, they will never suffice.}

It's now my new favorite word. I'm going to use it in lectures, without explanation . . .

[As to the lawyer, she has too much unsupervised free time. Perhaps we should introduce her to a potential client with too much unstructured free time: Richard Heene?]

I suspect Heene has enough concerns at this point without taking on an attorney like this! Whether the problem might be an excess of unstructured time, perhaps you're onto something; I recall what my mother and grandfather warned me about idle hands being the Devil's workshop. Thanks for your comment.

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I am presently corporate counsel for Accela, Inc., a software company headquartered in San Ramon, California and am a member of both the Oregon and California State Bars. More detailed professional information is available at my LinkedIn profile.

I have been blogging at Infamy or Praise since early 2005. From 2006 to 2009, I served as a "Sherpa" at Blawg Review, the weekly carnival of legal blogging; I have also hosted (or co-hosted) six editions of Blawg Review, the first four of which were awarded a "Blawg Review of the Year" award. I formerly was a co-blogger at Unsilent Partners. I'm on Twitter as "colinsamuels".

I am the author of "Humanizing the Profession: Lawyers Find Their Public Voices Through Blogging" (11 Nexus L. J. 89 (2006)) and a contributing author to "Blogging and Other Social Media" (Gower Publishing Limited, 2008) and "Legal Profession: Modern Approach" (The Icfai University Press, 2008).

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